Reinventing the PC was the promise that the world’s largest chipmaker made from the stage at its annual Intel Developer’s Forum in San Francisco on Monday. And if ever there was a moment when Intel needed to generate some excitement, this was it. Last week, Intel slashed its sales forecast for the September quarter, as demand for PCs lagged around the world.

In remarks before an audience made up primarily of product engineers and software developers, Intel’s chief product officer, Dadi Perlmutter, went through a batch of almost-interesting new capabilities for the personal computer, and showed off a handful of designs for new mobile PCs, aimed at dislodging that iPad or smartphone in your hand with something small and light that contains an Intel chip.

There were PCs that were small, PCs that were light, PCs with displays that detached from their bodies, and PCs that folded and twisted over the keyboard. All of them look like reheated concepts from the Tablet PC era circa 2002, their sole physical advantage being that they’re thinner and lighter than before, and touch-ready. Like an iPad.

Then came demos of two features around the personal computing experience from Nuance, maker of the Dragon line of voice control applications — one showing how soon you’ll be able to search Google, tweet and play digital media files with voice commands, a la Apple’s Siri, and the other, 3-D gestures a la Microsoft’s Kinect system for the Xbox. If this was Intel’s idea of generating excitement about the future of the PC, it didn’t work.

And what about Moore’s law? Certainly, the trend in computing power — enabled by the ability to shrink and thus double the number of transistors on a chip every two years or so — first observed 47 years ago by the Intel co-founder would enable some super-awesome new feature set that will make the PCs of 2013 seem quaint and silly and less awesome than PCs from before?

Not so much. Here’s a startling-when-you-think about it fact about Haswell, the code name for the new chip Intel plans to release next year. Moore’s law essentially allows you to make one of two fundamental choices as the transistor sizes on individual chips shrink with each successive generation. You can either build a chip that gets twice as much work done using about the same amount of power as the previous generation. Or you can build a chip that gets the same amount of work done using half the amount of power. Which choice do you think Intel made with Haswell? Same work, less power.

Of course, there are a lot more finely grained details about what Haswell will do (Anand Lal Shimpi has a detailed rundown on its many technical details here). Since mobile devices of every flavor and form factor imaginable are in, concerns over battery life have overtaken raw power on the list of priorities for Intel’s customers, the PC makers. For years, the need was always for more power, and Intel was ready to oblige. Now, computing power is so plentiful on a PC that most routine applications don’t even come close to taking advantage of it all.

And I wasn’t the only one who came away with this impression. At an informal gaggle of chip industry analysts after Perlmutter’s speech, the consensus was that the biggest benefit of Haswell is the improved power performance.

Patrick Moorhead, a former executive with Intel’s main rival, AMD, and now an industry analyst, put it to me in starker terms: “Intel has a week to show that the PC has a bright future over the next five to 10 years,” he said. “It’s all about usage models that can be done on a phone platform with wireless display and peripherals versus a PC platform.”

I don’t know that we’re quite that far along; I still rely on my home PC (okay, it’s a Mac), enhanced by a few external hard drives for backup purposes, to be the central storage and retrieval spot for all my digital stuff — my photos, my music, my videos, and many, many documents. And when I want to get some real work done, I turn first to that machine. The iPad I use to catch up on episodes of “Breaking Bad” and to read The New Yorker. I have a hard time imagining a world were PCs and tablets don’t coexist in most households in a long-term digital symbiosis, but it’s clear that those PCs will be replaced less frequently and will become more marginalized as consumer attention shifts to tablets and smartphones, devices where, at least to now, Intel isn’t strong.

PCs as we know them may in time go out of style, but there’s one thing that Intel can count on: It will still be called upon to build the best and most powerful chips it can for the millions of servers that will be needed to power the cloud-based services all those smartphones and tablets will be using. Battery life doesn’t matter in servers, though the need to use less power in data centers, and thus do more while operating at a lower cost, is always in style. The data center is at least one place where the one thing that Intel does better than anyone else — deliver ever more computing muscle for lower cost on an almost annual basis — will never go out of style.

AllThingsD got a demo of the technology last week. It basically brings together what Nuance does well: Speech recognition, text-to-speech, natural-language understanding and voice-ID biometric technology. It has rolled all of these into a hosted, cloud-based service that can be used by banks, insurance companies and other business who make customer service and account-access applications, which can now add all these features into their applications.

Nuance’s approach is to offer a prebuilt Nina virtual-assistant “persona,” a software developers kit and a set of APIs that companies can use to make these applications easier to use. If you can use Siri, then you’ll know what to do with Nina-enabled applications. You’ll be able to use it to pay bills, transfer money between accounts, and other basic things like that.

But here’s a key feature you might not expect: Nina can also use your voice to authenticate you. As part of our demo, we handed the phone around the room and tried to sign in to the demonstration banking app — only one of us could. If nothing else, adding a voice-based biometric option to banking apps would seem to improve the security of a mobile banking app, if only because sufficiently complicated passwords are hard to remember.

An early customer is USAA, a financial services company whose primary customers are U.S. military service members and veterans. Nuance has plans to offer the technology for use in travel, insurance, retail and government apps, as well.

“There is no more new news on Larry, Larry has lost his voice,” said Nikesh Arora, the company’s chief business officer.

Note his use of the past tense — apparently Page’s voice is still out of commission, a month after the issue was first disclosed.

Page “continues to run the company and he’s here, and involved on all the strategic business decisions we’re making,” Arora said.

But for those of us on the outside, we’ll have to wait at least three months for our quarterly dose of Larry’s excitement.

In an internal email to staff, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Google CEO Larry Page wrote that “there is nothing seriously wrong with me,” noting he would be in charge as usual.

Page missed a shareholders meeting last week and with the search giant saying he would not speak its upcoming Google I/O developers event this week or its next quarterly call in July, due to an unspecified issue with his voice.

Google has declined to give more information about the illness, despite what is likely to be increasing investor concern. But right now, Google shares have remained steady, even gaining slightly on Friday.

In a sea change for consumer behavior, the amount of time spent making old-fashioned voice calls has fallen every year since Apple Inc. introduced the iPhone in 2007. The rub for carriers is that voice billings still account for about two-thirds of what they charge cellphone customers every month.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

And today at D10, Skype boss Tony Bates said that the integration of the two companies is going well, and that he’s busy coming up with ways to serve billions of monthly users.

Bates talked a lot about how he was investing in mobile, including phones and tablets, to reach his aggressive growth targets, as well as about solutions for the living room.

During the interview and following Q&A session, Bates repeatedly answered questions about how Skype hasn’t — or has — changed since the merger.

One thing he said won’t change is that he’ll still have the opportunity to build the service on non-Microsoft products, such as Android and iOS. But he was clear about what he wasn’t open to — creating it so users could access Skype with people using different video-calling services.

“It’s critical to what we do,” he said.

Watch those highlights and others in this video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120531/tony-bates-on-skype-becoming-the-virtual-kitchen-table-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120429/mission-impossibly-funny-siri-will-self-destruct-in-five-seconds-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120429/mission-impossibly-funny-siri-will-self-destruct-in-five-seconds-video/#comments Sun, 29 Apr 2012 07:38:50 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=201024

Here is a very clever video which imagines a new feature on iPhone 5 — the Siri voice command cracks the device if you key in the wrong password three times in a row, after doing a quick data transfer to your iTunes account.

Somehow, I don’t think this going to be in the next version of the Apple smartphone, but it’s certainly innovative, in a twisted way.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120429/mission-impossibly-funny-siri-will-self-destruct-in-five-seconds-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120410/take-a-note-typing-with-no-hands/ http://allthingsd.com/20120410/take-a-note-typing-with-no-hands/#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 01:08:24 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://allthingsd.com/?p=195119 I am writing this paragraph on an iPhone. But I am not typing it on the phone’s virtual keyboard. I am dictating it using a little-known feature that allows you to employ your voice instead of your fingers, wherever text entry is possible on the device.

And now, for this paragraph, I have switched to an Android phone. Once again, I am composing these words using only my voice, and not typing them on the virtual keyboard.

Those two paragraphs, dictated as emails and then cut and pasted into this column on a computer, required far fewer corrections than you might think, given the bad reputation for accuracy that voice input on digital devices has acquired. I only had to add a comma I’d forgotten to specify in the first paragraph and capitalize the word “Android” in the second paragraph.

For me, a daily user of virtual keyboards, the process was quicker and more accurate than typing would likely have been, even for the relatively short blocks of text typically composed on phones.

So, on the suspicion that dictation on smartphones might prove useful for others as well, I’ve been testing it heavily over the past week. I used a top phone with Google’s Android software, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and an Apple iPhone 4S. In general, I found that, while dictation could occasionally fail badly, it worked surprisingly well in a wide variety of environments and applications.

On both leading smartphone platforms, I found that relatively short dictation—such as emails, texts, tweets, Facebook posts and notes—was at least as accurate, and often more, as typing on a glass screen. It was better in quiet environments, but did OK even in most noisy places like grocery stores, coffee shops and carwashes. It was also faster, since, as long as you don’t have to correct numerous errors, speaking is usually faster than typing on glass.

For this review, I am not mainly referring to Siri, the widely publicized, voice-controlled feature on the new iPhones, which can do things like tell you the weather, or stock prices. Nor am I discussing the “voice actions” on Android, which can perform Web searches and other tasks. Both can also help with some text dictation. I concentrated on a much simpler feature of both platforms: a small microphone key that’s included right in the phones’ on-screen keyboards.

Apple’s dictation system did better at capitalizing proper names.

Android phones have had this microphone key for a couple of years, and Apple added it to the latest iPhone, the 4S, last fall, and to the new iPad, when it came out last month. But I’m guessing that many users of these phones either haven’t used this special key, or haven’t even noticed it.

While the microphone keys work a bit differently on the two platforms, they are basically similar. When the keyboard appears, ready for you to type, you can instead hit the microphone key and simply dictate what you want to say. The phones then send your spoken words to a remote server, which rapidly translates them into text and sends them back to the phone’s screen. If corrections are needed, you make them by typing, though both platforms make this easier by indicating the likeliest errors, and suggesting alternatives.

A couple of caveats are in order. I didn’t compare dictation to typing on a phone with physical keys, whose devotees are often speedy and accurate. Instead, I thought the apt comparison was with a virtual keyboard, which is becoming the norm on phones, but is still a source of frustration for many users.

But Android was more reliable.

I also didn’t try dictating a long document, like this column, because phones are rarely used for lengthy composing.

I found that both platforms’ dictation systems worked well enough for me to recommend them. In case after case, both phones got it right, or close enough to require little correcting.

But there are differences. Android has an advantage in that, in the newest version of its operating system, it displays the dictated text almost in real time, lagging just slightly behind your spoken words. On the iPhone, the system only reveals its rendering of your dictation after you’ve tapped on a “Done” button.

Android’s dictation system also supports many more languages than Apple’s—40 languages and dialects, including Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew. On the iPhone, only English, French and German are currently supported, though Apple says Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish will be added later this year.

However, I found the iPhone 4S worked better than the Galaxy Nexus in noisier environments. For instance, in a crowded shopping-mall food court, while neither phone was perfect, the iPhone understood me to say: “I am dictating this email from the very noisy Court at Montgomery Mall on the iPhone”—missing only the word “food” and capitalizing “Court.” The Android phone mangled a very similar sentence as: “I am dictating this email on droid phone from the bearing noise for it montgomery mall.”

Google notes that, unlike Apple, it supports many phones, and that the results might have differed on another model, with better noise cancellation. Apple says the iPhone 4S does have noise cancellation. And, in any case, the two phones’ results were more comparable in quieter settings.

Apple’s system also did better at capitalizing proper names, like Stradivarius, or Red Sox, or even Google (which my Android phone, ironically, always rendered in lowercase). But Google says it will be updating its dictation feature in weeks to better handle proper names.

On the other hand, I found that, when Android did err, it had a more extensive and easier to use manner for correcting those mistakes than the iPhone did. Android was also more reliable; sometimes the iPhone returned no text at all.

Still, I found these differences less important than the fact that, for me, the results on both platforms were impressive. On both, if you say words like “period” or “comma,” you generally get the punctuation mark (though both try to make the distinction when you actually want a word like “period.”)

And, in test after test, both did a good job. Errors were generally fewer than if I had typed the words quickly.

Both have a downside: Because they do the transcription on their servers, and they are anxious to improve, they do retain some information about what you’re saying. Both companies say they respect your privacy, but, if you worry about transmitting your messages or notes to Apple or Google, don’t use dictation.

Otherwise, especially for those who find typing on glass clumsy, the microphone key on Android and the new iPhone is something you might want to add to your arsenal of ways to use your phone.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120410/take-a-note-typing-with-no-hands/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120319/not-surprisingly-u-s-teens-are-texting-more-talking-less/ http://allthingsd.com/20120319/not-surprisingly-u-s-teens-are-texting-more-talking-less/#comments Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:32:29 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=187765 ICYMI, teens are totes texting more.

And texting is increasingly becoming the communication application of choice for teens, while actually talking on the phone is on the decline.

The not-entirely-surprising data comes from the latest Pew Internet Research Center report, which included responses from nearly 800 U.S. teens, ages 12 to 17.

The study showed that the average number of texts sent by teens of all ages on a typical day rose from 50 a day to 60 a day between 2009 and 2011. Older teens, ages 14 to 17, showed an even greater increase, from a median of 60 texts a day in 2009 to a hundred texts a day in 2011.

And while 30 percent of teens said in 2009 that they used a landline to speak with friends, only 14 percent now say they talk on a landline daily. A third say they never use a landline (the study didn’t seem to offer data on those who asked, “What’s a landline?”). Even talking to friends on cellphones is edging down, from 38 percent in 2009 to just 26 percent in 2011.

Interestingly, though, the biggest texters were also the heaviest talkers, signaling that teens who are into their cellphones … are really into their cellphones.

In general, more teens now own some type of mobile device. Some 77 percent of U.S. teens now own some kind of cellphone, up 2 percent from a couple years ago. There’s no real difference in gender, it turns out, with boys and girls equally as likely to own cellphones, but younger boys — ages 12 and 13 — are the least likely to be early (early) adopters of cellphones.

Most teens are still using basic phones: Some 23 percent of those surveyed own smartphones, compared to 54 percent who own basic cellphones. But the patterns are shifting increasingly toward smartphones, especially among older teens.

Of course, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: Just under half of U.S. adults now own smartphones, according to this recent report, outnumbering adults who own feature phones by 5 percent.

The new Pew study also shows that teens with parents who have higher education levels are more likely to own cellphones; teens in the ’burbs and teens who are very active on social media are also more likely to have mobile devices, Pew reports.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr/Ei Katsumata)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120319/not-surprisingly-u-s-teens-are-texting-more-talking-less/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111220/nuance-buying-vlingo-a-rival-it-once-sued/ http://allthingsd.com/20111220/nuance-buying-vlingo-a-rival-it-once-sued/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:17:05 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=155411 It turns out all those depositions were a form of speed dating.

Speech technology company Nuance, which has been suing Vlingo, said on Tuesday that it is buying the mobile voice-software firm for an undisclosed price.

Of course, now the two firms have nothing but nice things to say about each other.

“Vlingo and Nuance have long shared a similar vision for the power and global proliferation of mobile voice and language understanding,” Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan said in a statement. “As a result of our complementary research and development efforts, our companies are stronger together than alone. Our combined resources afford us the opportunity to better compete, and offer a powerful proposition to customers, partners and developers.”

It wasn’t that long ago that Nuance was asserting that Vlingo’s vision was a little too similar. In August, a jury in one case found that Vlingo did not infringe on Nuance patents. However, Nuance noted at the time that it had other pending actions against Vlingo that it planned to continue pursuing.

Apparently, Apple’s introduction of Siri has convinced the two firms there are bigger fish to fry.

“Inspired by the introduction of services such as Apple’s Siri and our own Dragon Go!, virtually every mobile and consumer electronics company on the planet is looking for ways to integrate natural, conversational voice interactions into their mobile products, applications, and services,” Nuance mobile unit head Mike Thompson said in a statement.

Bygones.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111220/nuance-buying-vlingo-a-rival-it-once-sued/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111031/on-the-verge-of-a-new-tech-site-which-finally-debuts/ http://allthingsd.com/20111031/on-the-verge-of-a-new-tech-site-which-finally-debuts/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 02:18:14 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=138536

Tonight at 1 am PT, techies who have nothing else to do — that would be me! — can click onto a brand new tech site called The Verge.

Well, kind of — it’s the result of many months of work by the gang that defected from AOL’s popular Engadget tech powerhouse, set up temporary shop under the Web site name This Is My Next and busied themselves with creating The Verge.

I have another screenshot below of the new site that will be focused on news, reviews and features about tech, and which has been getting a final tweaking all today.

From my quick perusal, it has a vibrant and slick design, with a lot of packed boxes, swooshy movement and plenty of content.

Along with the launch, The Verge’s parent company — formerly doing business as SB Nation, focused on sports — will also transform into Vox Media.

In a chit-chat with Vox’s CEO Jim Bankoff, top exec Marty Moe and Josh Topolsky, The Verge’s Editor-in-Chief, the trio of former AOLers all said they were going to for the big time.

“We want to build the platform for talented native Web voices, in sports and tech for now, and then we plan to grow more verticals,” said Bankoff.

“We want to create more than a news site or blog about tech — the frustration at AOL was that we did not get the resources or manpower to realize that bigger vision,” said Topolsky.

(You’re speaking to the choir, brother!)

Said Moe: “We think this category has not had a large enough vision…not enough has been innovated over the years and we think it is a big opportunity.”

Topolsky said the site, along with a mass of original content from 30 writers, will also be helped by a strong database of information about all its topics and gadgets and also focus a lot on community input.

“What we want to do was graduate beyond the blog,” he said.

(Hmm…and here I just got the hang of this blog thing.)

Bankoff, who would not say how much Vox spent on launching The Verge — my back-of-the-envelope guess, several million dollars — said that costs were spread out between the tech and sports sites with centralized sales and product teams.

Initial launch sponsors are BMW, Sony and Samsung, said Moe, who is aiming to sell “major brand advertisers on the idea that we will be the premiere destination of consumer tech coverage.”

It has to grow past big sites like Engadget to do so, but Topolsky said that This Is My Next had three million unique visitors in the last month and more than 10 million page views.

“We have done that with a lot of editorials and in-depth reviews,” he said. “I think people are really hungry for great content and stories.”

As to competitors, Topolsky said that “this not to necessarily I win if you lose,” although his clear aim is to unseat sites like CBS-owned CNET, Engadget and Gawker Media’s Gizmodo and perhaps even newsier sites such as TechCrunch and AllThingsD (as if!).

“We are going to do the nuts and bolts stuff,” he said. “Somewhere between Engadget and Wired.”

Topolsky compared The Verge to a “boutique hotel — we have the same stuff everyone else has, but it is a much more elegant experience.”

Later, that will change, he promised, noting that “this is only version 1.0.”

Of course — but what else would you expect from a gadget site?

(Good luck and congrats to the entire The Verge team from AllThingsD!)

And here is another lovely screenshot, as promised:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111031/on-the-verge-of-a-new-tech-site-which-finally-debuts/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111030/off-with-their-heads-more-beheaded-siri-ads-for-apple-iphone-4s-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20111030/off-with-their-heads-more-beheaded-siri-ads-for-apple-iphone-4s-video/#comments Sun, 30 Oct 2011 22:03:12 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=138088

Apple seems to like to cut off the heads of all adults — kids appear to be spared the semi-beheadings — in these latest ads for its new iPhone 4S featuring the Siri voice control feature.

So, Siri: What is up with that — and the creepy “Halloween” style music that goes along with it?

I get that it is all about focusing on voice, but it still looks odd.

Oh, just watch, even if you have half a brain (I also added the video of the previous ad):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111030/off-with-their-heads-more-beheaded-siri-ads-for-apple-iphone-4s-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111023/exclusive-siri-co-founder-kittlaus-departs-from-apple/ http://allthingsd.com/20111023/exclusive-siri-co-founder-kittlaus-departs-from-apple/#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2011 06:17:12 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=135997

Dag Kittlaus — the co-founder and CEO of the company that created the Siri voice control feature, which Apple launched to much acclaim recently — has left the company, according to sources.

There were several reasons for the departure, which was amicable and has been planned for a while, sources said. They included Kittlaus’s family being in Chicago, a desire to take time off and an interest in brainstorming new entrepreneurial ideas.

Kittlaus has led the speech recognition efforts for Apple since Apple bought Siri in April of 2010. He had been Siri’s CEO since 2007. Before that, the Norwegian-born Kittlaus was an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Stanford Research Institute and had also worked at Motorola.

Kittlaus apparently left just after the launch of the iPhone 4S, in which Siri’s speech recognition technology was the highlight, but sources said other key execs from Siri are expected to remain at Apple.

I have queried Apple PR and am waiting for a response.

Here is a video of Kittlaus demoing Siri at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in 2009:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111023/exclusive-siri-co-founder-kittlaus-departs-from-apple/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111013/google-translate-can-now-say-take-that-siri-in-14-languages/ http://allthingsd.com/20111013/google-translate-can-now-say-take-that-siri-in-14-languages/#comments Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:00:53 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=131756

Google’s translation app for Android can now converse in far more languages.

The company, which has long offered text translations and speech-to-text translation, in January added an experimental feature allowing speech-to-speech translation between English and Spanish.

With Thursday’s update, the app now can translate among 14 spoken languages. Along with English and Spanish, the app now translates between Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish.

“Mobile technology and the web have made it easier for people around the world to access information and communicate with each other,” product manager Jeff Chin said in a blog posting. “But there’s still a daunting obstacle: the language barrier. We’re trying to knock down that barrier so everyone can communicate and connect more easily.”

Chin noted that the technology remains an early alpha version, with accents and background noise still a factor in accuracy.

“But since it depends on examples to learn, the quality will improve as people use it more,” Chin said. “We wanted to get this early version out to help start the conversation no matter where you are in the world.”

Google has also added in a feature that lets you hear what it thinks you said before it translates. That can be especially useful if what one wants to ask is “How much for the knife?” and Google hears “How much for your wife?”

The update comes in handy as AllThingsD heads to AsiaD, with the mobile team (a.k.a. me) headed to Taiwan and Korea in addition to Hong Kong. We’ll try to do a hands-on test in at least one of the supported languages on the trip.

Meanwhile, the number of languages supported for text and text-to-speech translations continues to grow, with 63 languages supported for text, speech-to-text in 17 languages and text-to-speech working in 24 languages.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111013/google-translate-can-now-say-take-that-siri-in-14-languages/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111006/now-what-the-post-jobs-era-in-tech/ http://allthingsd.com/20111006/now-what-the-post-jobs-era-in-tech/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:17:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=129320

As Steve Jobs famously said to rival Bill Gates of Microsoft in a joint interview with Walt Mossberg and me in 2007, “You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.” And perhaps what is most amazing about Jobs was his longevity.

Not in life, of course, which was cut tragically short at 56 years, with his last years focused a lot on the cancer that would ultimately defeat him.

Actually, by longevity, I mean how the iconic entrepreneur continued, until the very end, to have an enormous impact over all of technology and especially in Silicon Valley.

It is easy to see that Jobs has been the single consistent tech tastemaker and true-north icon — even in the frantically changing, what’s-new-is-best atmosphere that too often prevails in the industry.

The list of tech and media arenas he changed via innovative thinking and, more importantly, action, is long — from graphics to design to touchscreens to smartphones to tablets to animation to ease of use to apps to quality to, well, you get the idea.

The hits seemed nonstop: The Macintosh. The iPod. And iTunes. The MacBook. The iPhone. The iPad.

And it is no stretch to say that even the brightest lights in tech and media always watched what he did and were influenced by him, reacted to him, changed because he changed.

In many ways, it was because Jobs never seemed to waver.

Let’s be clear, this is not an easy thing to do, to keep sailing on your own course, often against the prevailing winds, and not be swayed.

Perhaps that is the thing that Jobs most exemplified — a stubborn unwillingness to adjust who he was, maintaining an integrity of purpose and vision when others could not.

It is certainly what has made him — and by extension, Apple — so special. Of course, it is not that he was not difficult, capricious and cutting at times. But even that he owned.

So who and what does tech look to now for that kind of inspiration?

Certainly, at this moment, there is no one leader to fill Jobs’s outsized shoes.

The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin? Quirky, curious, arrogant, but so, so prosaic.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg? Still forming, so awkward and not yet the leader he might become.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon? Certainly creative and bold, but utterly lacking in the moxie and style of Steve.

I could go on and not get to anyone even slightly close — there’s no one with the kind of charisma that makes it impossible to look away.

It’s called inspiration, a quality so lacking in all parts of this world, making it hard to imagine any replacement for Jobs.

And, in a way, why should we try to find one?

As Jobs himself said in his memorable “Stay hungry. Stay foolish” speech at Stanford University, right after he recovered from his first bout with cancer:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No reason at all. So, as we all wish Jobs could have done, let’s live on.

And so will Steve Jobs. As AllThingsD Web guru Adam Tow said about the innovative Siri voice control feature in the latest iPhone 4 — introduced earlier this week without Jobs being there to present — perhaps Siri stands for: Steve is right inside.

Yes, indeed. Because his DNA lives in all of Apple. And, of course, in Silicon Valley and in tech, forever and always.

But we move on, too, so here is a video I did yesterday with WSJ.com on what impact Jobs’s death may have on Apple and whether the company will remain an innovator and market leader:

RELATED POSTS:

• Samsung, Google Cancel Launch Event Out of Respect for Steve Jobs
• Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert Say Goodbye to Steve Jobs
• An Accountant’s Soul Presides Over the P&L at Apple
• New York Times Crossword Honors Steve Jobs With Puzzle Written by Quora Engineer
• For Steve (Comic)
• Walt Mossberg Reflects on Life and Career of Steve Jobs for Fox Business (Video)
• Apple Shares Rise
• Steve Jobs Biography Arrives in October, a Month Early
• Now What? The Post-Jobs Era in Tech.
• Thoughts on the First Day of Apple’s Post-Jobs Era
• How Will Apple Shares Fare Today?
• Tributes to Steve Jobs, in Pictures
• The Three Irreplaceable Qualities of Steve Jobs
• Walt Mossberg: The Steve Jobs I Knew
• Remembering the Life of Steve Jobs
• Steve Jobs in His Own Words
• Barack Obama On Steve Jobs
• Tech and Media Titans Pay Tribute to Steve Jobs
• Steve Jobs’s Appearances at D, the Full Video Sessions
• Bill Gates: “I Will Miss Steve Immensely”
• Steve Jobs Through the Years: Highlights and Clips From the D Conference
• Steve Jobs Has Died

Steve Jobs Full Coverage »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111006/now-what-the-post-jobs-era-in-tech/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111004/in-depth-with-siri-the-full-demo-from-the-d7-conference-plus-an-old-school-bonus/ http://allthingsd.com/20111004/in-depth-with-siri-the-full-demo-from-the-d7-conference-plus-an-old-school-bonus/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:41:23 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=128520 Way back at D7, independent software company Siri demoed its impressive voice assistant product on stage for our audience.

Even in 2009, the machine learning-assisted software was pretty compelling — enough to get the company bought by Apple a short time later.

Then, Siri sort of went into hiding.

Today, Apple unveiled what it had in mind for Siri and showcased a host of features that will be added to the iPhone 4S thanks to Siri’s intelligent voice recognition features.

Here’s Siri’s entire tech demo from back at D7.

And if you are an old-school Apple geek, check out Apple’s vision for a voice-activated personal assistant, circa 1987.

RELATED POSTS:

• Commas, Zeros and No. 1: Apple’s iPhone 4S Event by the Numbers
• In Depth With Siri: The Full Demo From the D7 Conference (Plus an Old-School Bonus)
• Tim Cook Follows Steve Jobs’s Footsteps Closely in Big Stage Debut
• Just Like We Didn’t Tell You: No Apple-Facebook Tie-Up Today
• Why Siri Sounds Like a Lady
• I Am Number 4S? — No Sparkly iPhone 5 Disappoints Apple Fans (and Wall Street)
• Exclusive: AT&T’s New App Will Let You Get a New iPhone — From Your Existing iPhone
• Apple’s Quiet iPhone Move: More Price Pressure
• Apple Wants You to Meet Siri, Your New Personal Assistant
• Apple’s Game Center Scores 67 Million Players
• So What Puts the S in the New iPhone 4S?
• Apple’s “Find My Friends” Location Feature Is More Like Glympse Than Foursquare
• Apple Updates iPods with Cheaper iPod Touch and Nano
• Apple Turns the iPhone into a Hallmark Store
• Apple’s “Let’s Talk iPhone” Event, LIVE
• Even If He’s Not at Apple Event, Steve Jobs Sure Knows How to Put on a Show
• Viral Video: The iPhone 5 as Love Potion #9
• Mostly Sunny With 100 Percent Chance of Apples
• What’s Behind a Tim Cook Apple Event (Comic)
• Apple Launching iPhone 5 in October
• Apple’s Next Event to Be Held on October 4, Starring Its New CEO
• October iPhone Event to Be Held on Apple Campus
• Apple Announces October 4 Event: Let’s Talk iPhone

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111004/in-depth-with-siri-the-full-demo-from-the-d7-conference-plus-an-old-school-bonus/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20111004/i-am-number-4s-no-sparkly-iphone-5-disappoints-apple-fans-and-wall-street/ http://allthingsd.com/20111004/i-am-number-4s-no-sparkly-iphone-5-disappoints-apple-fans-and-wall-street/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:08:46 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=128335

Apple rolled out a new iPhone today. Sort of.

Except it did not have a bigger, flatter screen. It did not have a sleeker, thinner body. It would not need all new polypropylene sleeves and other fancy accessories.

In other words, it was not an iPhone 5.

Oops, after all the breathless stories about this ideal and groundbreaking new device and predictions — including here — that this was the name of whatever Apple was releasing.

In fact, everyone was using that moniker for it, from local television news to vendors to my mother.

Instead, the tech giant launched the new iPhone 4S, which has a faster processor, an improved camera and Siri voice control feature, at a cheaper price.

Very slick, as usual, and full of cool Apple bells and whistles.

Still. Prolonged sighs could be felt all over the blogosphere and on Twitter, where Steve Brown tweeted me: “Can I be bummed now?!?”

You may.

Better still, Davin Bentti wrote: “The ‘S’ stands for ‘Steve, come back!’”

He was referring to the missing Apple icon Steve Jobs, who recently turned over leadership at the company to new CEO Tim Cook. Jobs’s Apple event performances are legendary.

Wall Street also had its iPhone 5 bubble burst, with investors shunning Apple stock. Shares are down almost five percent now.

RELATED POSTS:

• Commas, Zeros and No. 1: Apple’s iPhone 4S Event by the Numbers
• In Depth With Siri: The Full Demo From the D7 Conference (Plus an Old-School Bonus)
• Tim Cook Follows Steve Jobs’s Footsteps Closely in Big Stage Debut
• Just Like We Didn’t Tell You: No Apple-Facebook Tie-Up Today
• Why Siri Sounds Like a Lady
• I Am Number 4S? — No Sparkly iPhone 5 Disappoints Apple Fans (and Wall Street)
• Exclusive: AT&T’s New App Will Let You Get a New iPhone — From Your Existing iPhone
• Apple’s Quiet iPhone Move: More Price Pressure
• Apple Wants You to Meet Siri, Your New Personal Assistant
• Apple’s Game Center Scores 67 Million Players
• So What Puts the S in the New iPhone 4S?
• Apple’s “Find My Friends” Location Feature Is More Like Glympse Than Foursquare
• Apple Updates iPods with Cheaper iPod Touch and Nano
• Apple Turns the iPhone into a Hallmark Store
• Apple’s “Let’s Talk iPhone” Event, LIVE
• Even If He’s Not at Apple Event, Steve Jobs Sure Knows How to Put on a Show
• Viral Video: The iPhone 5 as Love Potion #9
• Mostly Sunny With 100 Percent Chance of Apples
• What’s Behind a Tim Cook Apple Event (Comic)
• Apple Launching iPhone 5 in October
• Apple’s Next Event to Be Held on October 4, Starring Its New CEO
• October iPhone Event to Be Held on Apple Campus
• Apple Announces October 4 Event: Let’s Talk iPhone

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111004/i-am-number-4s-no-sparkly-iphone-5-disappoints-apple-fans-and-wall-street/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110620/nuance-quietly-snaps-up-noterize-an-iphone-note-taking-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20110620/nuance-quietly-snaps-up-noterize-an-iphone-note-taking-app/#comments Mon, 20 Jun 2011 20:55:35 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=88641 Voice software specialist Nuance has quietly acquired the technology behind Noterize, an iOS note-taking app. The deal is fueling speculation on what sorts of new voice-powered document technology the company might have in mind.

A Nuance representative confirmed that the company acquired the source code for the product — but not the staff behind Noterize — back in March. Because the acquisition was a small one, Nuance said it did not announce the deal at the time.

The deal finally attracted notice more recently, after the app was pulled down from the iTunes store. The program’s Web site confirmed the acqusition and directed all inquiries to Nuance.

“Because of the acquisition of the code, Nuance must re-submit the application for approval by Apple,” the Nuance representative said. “Nuance is updating the copyright information as well as the support contacts in the app and we’ll repost the app once this is complete.”

Over time, Nuance said it plans to also integrate the technology into its product lineup.

“We’re integrating the Notarize source code now into our Document Imaging portfolio and we’ll have more details about our mobile solutions for document imaging in the near future,” the representative said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110620/nuance-quietly-snaps-up-noterize-an-iphone-note-taking-app/feed/ 0